


Hold Up Half the Sky

by StalwartNavigator (Fallwater023)



Series: Dragonslain [3]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Carpentry/Masonry Metaphors, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Gender Issues, Gender in Politics, Happy Ending, Inheritance, M/M, Moar OCs, Politics, Royalty, Sexism, Time Skips, succession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-18
Updated: 2015-08-18
Packaged: 2018-04-15 10:33:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4603485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallwater023/pseuds/StalwartNavigator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thain has a choice to make</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hold Up Half the Sky

It was a fair day, and bright, and the sun shone on Erebor. 

Thain was losing his mind. 

Neither the danger nor the screaming nor the shadow of death he could nearly feel shook him in his boots. It was the Mahal-cursed _waiting._

He paced. Fain paced with him. Linna sat in a corner, working on some fine goldenlace jewelry and laughing at them. 

“Truly, brother,” she said as she crossed gleaming bobbins over each other, “Your lady wife will be fine. Jenet is strong.” But her fingers trembled a little on the threads, and Thain didn’t have to remind her that Durin births were sometimes difficult. Jenet would endure; their child might not be so blessed. 

Another growling shout echoed from the birthing-room, and Fain yanked fretfully at his beard. His little brother looked from the door, to Thain, to the door again, and sighed heavily. “Gannet knows what she’s doing.” A distant kinswoman of Jenet’s, Gannet was well respected in the Iron Hills for her herbcraft and had come to assist the birth. “And Jenet’s health has been well this far. The babe didn’t weigh heavily on her.” 

Thain sighed too, and nodded. There had been none of the bleeding or extended illness that forewarned a dangerous birth. 

So the children of Fili watched, and the children of Fili waited. 

Shortly before the third bell of dawn, they had their answer. 

The door cracked open. Linna startled awake in her seat. Fain looked up from the mantle where he leaned, and Thain stopped his pacing track to approach Gannet. The tough old woman looked up at him solemnly. For half a beat, Thain’s breath caught in his throat. 

Then she smiled broadly. Thain, Crown Prince Under the Mountain, felt the most extraordinary lifting feeling in his chest. “Your lady wife is well, my King, and blessed with a daughter.”

For a moment the air hung still. 

“A girl?” Thain managed to choke out, and Linna pressed a hand to her mouth; he could see Fain’s jaw drop out the corner of his eye. In all the ages of their house, the daughters of Durin were scarce and usually the last born of their siblings. Never had a daughter been firstborn to the Throne of Erebor. 

“Mahal is kind,” Gannet shrugged. Perhaps to an Iron Hills Blacklock it was not so shocking a thing: Jenet’s line had always borne a greater proportion of daughters, though with fewer children altogether. “Mother and child are ready now, if you would see your daughter.” 

“Of - of course,” and he brushed past her into the chamber that held his family. 

Oh, his first sight of his daughter felt like a hammer blow, and he barely saw the sweet exhausted smile of his wife lying abed. His hand trembled - trembled! - on her shoulder. He hovered, awkward and anxious. 

“Jenet, azyungal, I - ,” 

“Sshh, kurdu,” she murmured, glancing up from their daughter’s face. “I know,” and her eyes were wet too. 

“I - we spoke of names for boys, I know we did - ,” Curse it all, his tongue fumbled in this precious moment. 

There was the knife-sharp grin his wife was famed for. “Thay, dearest, we settled on for a son. Or Thorn, I think.” 

“But a daughter,” he set down on the bedspread next to her, “What name would you have for a girl of your blood?” While there was more flexibility in tradition these days, a generation after the joining of dwarf and hobbit in the new people of Erebor, the naming-right for daughters still ran strong in the mother’s line. 

Jenet looked down at their girl’s face. Her eyes were so soft as he had rarely seen before. “The -et ending is tradition, from our family’s earliest days. I would have her feel as one with her mother, and her grandmother, and her Blacklock cousins. Hmm…” Thain tried to give his own thought to the problem in case she asked his advice, but could not think so clear when their child burbled and whimpered - so loud for such a little thing! “Thet - it does not go so well, does it. Thett...Thot - Thaet...What say you of Thayet?”

“Thayet,” he repeated, and looked on their girl. Fine dark fuzz covered her head, and he thought he saw the shape of his wife’s eyes set over the proud Durin nose. “Thayet, Princess Under the Mountain.” He half-thought his wife stiffened a moment under his hand before nodding quietly. 

“Princess Thayet. Thayet Jenetil, Thayet Thainul, Thayet of Erebor,” Jenet tried a few times aloud, before nodding. “Thayet, my girl.” 

XXX

The news had been proclaimed from the heights and depths of the Mountain. The babe, though small at birth even for a dwarf, thrived her first hour and week and month. Emissaries came from Dale and Greenwood and the Iron Hills; even haughty King Thranduil stooped to smile at Thayet. 

She was a pretty child once the flush of birth had left her skin. The Durin nose grew prouder as she grew, by the leaps and bounds of dwarven infants; her eyes grew darker than her mother’s, a brown close to black. It was early even by dwarven standards - but many visiting dwarf dignitaries had eyed her and spoke testingly of their own child kinsmen at home. Dwarrowlings who would be heir to great wealth or land or force of arms. Dwarrowlings who would seek the favor and alliance of the Mountain. His daughter would not be wanting for choice when the time came to seek her One. 

Thain looked these dwarves in the eye. And though he nodded thoughtfully and promised nothing, he thought with a twinge of Old Uncle Bilbo. 

The hobbit had lived to a tremendous age. Adad had joked that his would be the first reign to officially begin after his own death, for surely the Consort of the last King would outlive his husband’s successor. Bilbo would be the first to do so, of sheer stubbornness. After his siblings and his parents, Old Uncle had been the first to see the baby. 

“Oh, sweetheart, what a treasure you are!” Old Uncle had exclaimed, and tickled the baby and chortled and sung to her his old Shire songs. And after he’d had his fun, he had turned to Thain and said, “Oh how proud you must be, m’boy, to have an heir to your line!” 

Thain sighed. He was used to this sort of thing, in a Mountain filled half with hobbits and half with dwarves. The children of Erebor were raised on cultural clashes, and didn’t take them too dear to heart. “She’s not heir, Uncle, she’s a _princess_ ,”

And then Bilbo had stopped, and gently set the baby down in his lap, and given Thain a very stern look. He remembered that look from his tween days of lesson-skipping and mischief-making. It wasn’t a feel-good look. Bilbo had helped raise three royal dwarrowlings and eight more, the children of the Company. His stern looks could say ‘You are half-blind, half-mad, and completely stupid if you think that sort of behavior will fly in this Mountain, my lad,’ more clearly and viciously than any tone of voice. 

Bilbo must have seen Thain quail before the force of The Look, for he gentled when he said, “Now, m’boy, why is that?” 

And this was worse. When Thain had been a young dwarrow and done something truly stupid that he would never speak of ever because it was just too awful (Fain would be happy to tell, but only because he thought of the ending as a punchline), Bilbo had sat him down and done just this. Patiently asked him _why,_ and _why,_ and _why_ again until he was shaking and crying and burning with shame.

It had been terrible. And now he was a dwarf grown, Crown Prince Under the Mountain, and had learned his lessons and knew how the world worked. He refused to be made a child again at Old Uncle Bilbo’s knee. “Uncle Bilbo, never in all the days of our line has a dwarrowdam been Queen Sovereign Under the Mountain. It is not done.” He tried the tone of his father and grandfather’s which had always silenced opposition. It had worked for him before in council chambers. 

And he remembered with a sinking sensation that Old Uncle Bilbo had _lived_ with Grandpa Thorin and been friends with Adad practically his whole life. The Tone had no effect on him. 

“Perhaps,” Old Uncle murmured, and now he was dandling Thayet again and looking deep in her eyes, “It is time to do it.” 

XXX

Old Uncle had passed later that week, and the burial had taken place before the great festivals of his daughter’s name day. The funeral was small, but there had been nary a dry eye in the audience as they laid their Dragonslayer to rest behind a round tomb door of green malachite. He would be near Grandpa Thorin in death as he had been in life, but a dwarven tomb would not suit him. Old Uncle deserved a reminder of the Shire, in whatever sunny place he dwelled now. 

Thain looked at the mourners. The survivors of the company were here, and the whole royal family. The Lost Children had come in force, what remained of them: Bristy, Makk, Perin, and Guwin. The Deep Council came to pay respects at the passing of the last Consort, who had served honorably and well for so long among them. Tomorrow, the scribes would set down on the Wall of Kings that today began the reign of Fili son of Vali, adopted son of Thorin Oakenshield, with the death of his predecessor’s Royal Consort Bilbo Baggins. 

He realized with a startle that nearly all the Deep Council were women now. A double-handful of nobles had passed of old age, and their sons had preceded them on the battlefield; their daughters had inherited their positions with nary a hitch in the running of the Mountain. Now he thought of it, Bristy was Head of the Guard, and Linna was not the Head of the Jeweler’s Guild, but very near to it. A good third of the Guilds were run by women in these days after the Ringwar, and he would bet his buttons that many of the male guildmasters would be succeeded by women. 

It was like opening his eyes. Everywhere he looked, he saw dwarf-women. All his childhood he had thought dwarrowdams a rarity. Now he realized they were all over Erebor; in households and marketplaces, Guildhalls and forges and mines, the halls of government and the lower streets. 

When in doubt, Uncle Ori had always told him, hearken to your evidence. So he went to the City Records and found the great tomes of immigration papers. 

So many immigrants after the Battle of Five Armies had been widowed mothers or single women that he nearly did a double-take. In a dusty afternoon of parchment-scratching and quick figuring, he realized that the battle-death of so many dwarf men and the immigration of so many dwarrowdams had brought the balance of dwarven genders in Erebor nearly even. And in the decades after, nearly every married dwarrowdam had produced a daughter. For the first time in the history of dwarfkind, there were as many female dwarves as male Under the Mountain. Many were listed under male names in the census Adad had ordered in Thain’s childhood, for reasons of employment or travel or personal preference; they would have worn men’s braids and comported themselves as men. Perhaps that was why he hadn’t noticed until now. 

Thain thought on this, long and hard. He’d never met his Grandma Sigdis, but Adad and Uncle Kili and Grandpa Thorin always said she was a hammer, striking straight and true to her purpose. Goodness knew Bristy was scarier than any male he knew, hobbit or dwarrow, and Linna would have his balls for earrings if he dared suggest she was less competent than another jeweler by merit of gender. 

_Amad._ It had been so long since he’d thought of her. Lady Sanna had passed in childbirth, with an unnamed brother Thain would never know. He had been barely of age. She was the rock of their family - even Grandpa Thorin leaned on her level sense, which he praised as the best in the mountain. After her death, Grandpa had stopped saying that Thain had his mother’s level sense, her knowing of fairness and the right action to make the future smooth out as even as a dwarf-mason’s joinery. Maybe he himself had forgotten that he had it. It had been hard to put into words, but - the world _wanted_ to be right, wanted to fix itself when things were out of joint. All he did was give it hands, and a voice. 

Thain closed his eyes. Let the world pull him in the right direction.

**Author's Note:**

> "The test of civilization is its estimate of women" - George William Curtis
> 
> Yes, the name is a nod to Tamora Pierce, whose world of Tortall was an escape from my preteen and teenage years.


End file.
